“Arthur’s very moral. He’s the one who made up the rules.” “What rules?”

“How to act, what to do, what not to do.”

“Well, I think Arthur will be very helpful in curing you, if he will cooperate with us.”

“I’m sure he will,” Billy said, “because Arthurs always saying how its important for us to get all together and get well so I can become a useful citizen and a contributing member of society. But I don’t know where he’s gone now.”

As they spoke, Caul had the feeling Billy was gaining confidence in him. Caul brought him back to the ward, showed him his room and introduced him once again to his case manager and some of the other people on the ward.

“Norma, this is Billy, ’ Caul said. “He’s new here. We ought to get someone to show him around AIT.”

“Of course, Dr. Caul.”

But when she walked him back to his room, she looked at him steadily. “You know your way around here by now, Billy, so we won’t have to go through that again.”

“What’s AIT?” he asked.

She led him to the main entrance to the ward and opened the heavy door, pointing to the sign: “Admissions and Intensive Treatment. We call it AIT for short.” Then she turned and left.

Billy wondered what he had done to make her so curt with him, but try as he might, he couldn’t figure it out.

When he learned that his sister and mother were coming to visit that evening, he became tense. He had seen Kathy, his sister, at the trial, and as soon as he had gotten over the shock of seeing his fourteen-year-old sister transformed into an attractive twenty-one-year-old woman, he felt comfortable with her. But his mother hadn’t been at the trial, at his own insistence. Though Kathy had assured him that his mother had visited him often at Harding Hospital, and before that at Lebanon prison, he had no recollection of any of it.

The last time he’d seen Mom was when he was sixteen, before they’d put him to sleep. But the image in his mind was from an earlier time: her beautiful face covered with blood, and a big chunk of hair ripped out of her scalp … That was the face he remembered, from when he was fourteen.

When they came to AIT, he was shocked to see how his mother had aged. Her face was lined. Her hair, curled into tight dark ringlets, looked like a wig. But the blue eyes and the pouting lips were still beautiful.

She and Kathy reminisced about the past, each trying to outdo the other in recalling moments which had been confusing in his childhood but which they could now explain as having been caused by one of the other personalities.

“I always knew there were two,” his mother said. “I always / said there was my Billy and that other one. I tried to tell them you needed help, but no one would listen to me. I told the doctors and I told that lawyer who plea-bargained you into Lebanon. But no one would listen to me.”